Healthy Text Scheduler

Healthy Text Scheduler can help you make the changes needed at any age to eat healthier by scheduling text messages to serve as reminders when you need them most.

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Inspiration

During my career, I have held medical director positions with several chronic care/disease management companies and led clinical teams to help identified patients improve their behaviors around activities that could keep them healthier. Consequently, I studied several behavior-change models and coached my staff in their use with our patients. A pivotal event in using those strategies personally was in response to a near-fatal heart attack I sustained in late 2003. I was determined to apply those strategies that I promoted to the patients under my care to my own eating and exercise habits. It took a lot of effort to implement healthier habits, but thanks to those efforts I was blessed to see my own two children graduate college and get married, and enjoy fun activities with my grandchildren. It hasn’t been smooth sailing, but those improved habits have helped me withstand the downturns over the decades. In retrospect, I believe that my initial cardiac rehabilitation efforts were part of my motivation for starting to build an interactive website in 2005 called InsightsForHealth.com. It provides tools for its users to make improvements in their nutrition and exercise behaviors. Part of my drive was to share those strategies that have worked for me to recover from that cardiac event. Then as I learned how to build Alexa Skills, I saw an opportunity to leverage one of those tools through the vocal interface of an Alexa Skill, and Healthy Text Scheduler was born. The potential for improving our lives through attaining and maintaining a healthy weight continues as we age, and that is the reason I feel Healthy Text Scheduler fits perfectly in the scope of this hackathon.

What it does

Most people who are changing their nutrition and exercise habits to lose weight have trouble putting what they know they should do into practice. The problem is that their usual unhealthy behaviors are so automatic that they need help remembering to substitute their new healthier behaviors when the occasion arises. This is where Healthy Text Scheduler comes in!

With Healthy Text Scheduler, you schedule text messages to yourself to give you encouragement and tips to help you stick to your weight loss plan just when you need them. After a one-time registration where you provide your cell phone number, cell phone carrier & the name by which you’d like to be identified, you can schedule as many text programs as you’d like. For each series, you set the starting date, start time, end date, and your time zone.

With Healthy Text Scheduler you can:

  1. Register any or all the members of your household
  2. Schedule a series of Healthy Text messages. The content depends upon the time of day you choose to schedule your texts.
  3. See your Text Schedule
  4. Delete individual Text Programs
  5. Remove a Registered User In addition, whether the user's cell carrier is supported or not, you can get random healthy exercise or nutrition tips.

The Text Programs may be focused on as many of these as you wish:

  1. Breakfast
  2. Morning Snack
  3. Lunch
  4. Afternoon Snack
  5. Dinner
  6. Evening Snack

This latest version supports Echo devices with displays and doubles the number of supported cell carriers to 12. They include:

  1. AT & T,
  2. Boost Mobile,
  3. Consumer Cellular,
  4. Cricket,
  5. C-Spire,
  6. Mint Mobile,
  7. Sprint,
  8. T-Mobile,
  9. Tracfone,
  10. U. S. Cellular,
  11. Verizon, and
  12. Xfinity.

As mentioned above, Healthy Text Scheduler was designed to take advantage of Health-e Texts, one of the functionalities of www.InsightsForHealth.com, a website built to support individuals looking to lose weight through healthy eating and exercise.

The information provided through this Skill or from the www.InsightsForHealth.com website is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, treatment, or diagnosis. Call your doctor to receive medical advice. If you think you may have a medical emergency, please dial your local emergency response phone number.

How I built it

I used JavaScript, MySQL, and Amazon Alexa with APL support for devices with displays.

Challenges I ran into

I would say that finding the correct SMS components to correspond with the most popular cell phone carriers and providing as smooth a process as possible for the user to identify their carrier were a bit of a challenge.

Accomplishments that I’m proud of

I’m most proud of the fact that through Healthy Text Scheduler I have been able to provide the value of these Healthy Text programs to a new audience.

What I learned

I learned more about APL design and dialogue flow.

What's next for Healthy Text Scheduler

I’m thinking of possibly expanding the variety of the text message topics. Possibilities include texts surrounding specific events like eating out or grocery shopping. In addition, texts surrounding exercise offer more possibilities.

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